I was thinking about this the other day and I realize that I have absolutely no idea what any of my bosses actually do for a living. In my structure we have associates (of which I am one), mentors, supervisors, and associate manager and a department manager, along with various and sundry VPs.
And I haven’t a clue what any of them actually do.
Oh, I’ve read their job descriptions. I know what their functions are supposed to be. But I look up from my little computer and I see the mentors and the supervisors and the asst manager and the department manager sitting in their cubicles or offices, not appearing to be doing anything. As far as the VPs go, all I ever hear out of any of them are the extortionate emails cajoling me to contribute money to United Way to make them look beeter at Rotary or whatever. So I haven’t the foggiest notion what, on a day-to-day basis, these people actually do for their paychecks.
How about you? Do you have any idea what your boss does for a living?
He travels. A lot. He’s either in Texas or visiting a couple of other projects in Illinois, often all in the same week. I bet he has a TON of miles.
The HR person, on the other hand, I have no idea what she does. She doesn’t help me find my next project, she doesn’t help me when I have problems, and we’re not hiring… what the hell does she do?
Come to think of it, I don’t really know what my boss does. I know he gets really drunk when he hangs out with our insurance people. He also seems to golf a lot.
I knew what my immediate group leader, supervisor and manager did (at my summer job), for the most part. Even my manager’s manager - I had a pretty good idea of what he did, since I had the luck of being in the lab group that dealt with EERY project the company had, and so we saw more of what was going on than I think I would have otherwise.
There are other people who I’m not sure what they did, though. A lot of Compliance and QA seemed to hang out a lot and chat, and Health and Safety and HR drank a lot of coffee. I know through various means that things DID get done by them - I just never saw it happen!
I’ve had evil bosses in the past who would sit in their offices with the door closed all day. I thought at the time they were doing Extremely Important Stuff, but now I think they were tweaking their fantasy baseball teams.
My current boss totally rocks, though. I know exactly what he does because we (the four people in my department) work in an extremely tight team, and if anyone doesn’t know what the others are doing it’ll all get screwed up.
A little food for thought: if you’re interested in advancing into management, the first step is to absolutely know what your bosses job is.
The typical (95%+) employee sees their bosses actions only in terms of how it relates to them. Which explains why their boss seems like an idiot to them; they only see a small part of the bosses concerns and responsibilities.
Wanna be a boss? Learn what the bosses problems are, and figure out how you would solve them. Learn what a bosses reponsibilities are and figure out how you would handle them.
I know exactly what my boss does, because it is not really any different from what I do, except he deals more directly with our appointments to projects, our charge-out rates and our fees. But everything else he does revolves around the same design / project managerment / construction supervision necessities that everyone does in our office. All he has is more overall responsibility. (and more experience, obviously.)
I work at a restaurant, so mainly my boss runs around doing a little bit of everything, and not much of anything…most of what he does could be done better by someone else, and everything he does could be done by just about anybody else.
He says “No” a lot, too. Does that count? “No, we cannot pick up that popular new liquor. We don’t need it.” “No, you can’t call in.” “No, you’re not off yet.” “No, we’re not ordering any more new uniforms.” “No, I haven’t written the schedule yet.” “No, I haven’t been by that table yet.” “No, I don’t know where my keys are.” “No, I haven’t seen the other manager.” “No, I don’t know why we didn’t defrost more pork chops this morning.”
He hands out his keys, writes schedules, “oversees” things, bitches a lot, surfs the internet, and says “No.”
She fights for money for us all the time (she once said, “Never underestimate the power of an annoying voice”). She sits in on endlessly boring bureaucratic meetings, recognizes the one moment when they are about to do horrible things to us in the name of power, and stands up and stops them. She thinks of cuckoo examples from her own life. She throws cold water on media fires when they start up. She gives shit to people who need shit given to them. She worries needlessly about catastrophes, makes big plans to deal with them, and gives us the plans to prepare, so any time anything happens, we deal, if only to keep her off our backs. She gives advice out of her 40 year fund of experience. She tries to smooth out inter-employee fights (not always easy). She comes down hard on me when she thinks I’ve screwed up, and lets me talk my way out of it. She gives awards to employees whenever she can think of an excuse.
She also testifies in court a lot, and does the occasional autopsy when the rest of us are not able to cover the job, for whatever reason.
Every job has some bad apples, and your boss might be one of them, but I used to wait tables for a while, and though I had bosses in that time whom I loved and whom I hated, I wouldn’t question the unbelievable amount of work they did. Every single one of them (even the ones who were ignorant, arrogant, sometimes psychotic jerks) put in more hard hours than anyone else there, plus dealt with more stress, more problems, and did more work in a day than I have in my whole life. One boss literally worked himself into the hospital and when he got out, what do you think he did? He went right back to work and started making up for the time he missed. As I said, you don’t have to be smart or nice to be a restaurant manager (and many aren’t). In some ways, its a job any one could do. For about twenty minutes. Then most of us would collapse in a whimpering heap while our staff walked out the door. A succesful restaurant manager just about has to be superhuman, and while I don’t like them all, I respect the hell out of the ones I’ve met.
It’s actually kind of mind-boggling to me that people don’t know what their boss does. Audrey Levins complains that he “runs around doing a little bit of everything, and not much of anything”. Well that’s his job. Making sure all the little cogs in the machine are all turning together. It’s amazing how people believe that their job is the center of the organization. Our secretary thinks she could “run the company” because she is able to file all our paperwork. It’s actually a lot more comlicated than that.
My bosses examine patients, formulate treatment plans, and do surgeries. They make our schedules, do our evaluations, and decide our salaries. They’re the ones who pick up the phone or go into the exam room and say, “Well, the labwork shows this, this, and this. I’m afraid there’s nothing we can do,” and try to comfort the owners. They stay late just about every shift to finish charts and discharge summaries, then call when they get home to check on their patients. They make more decisions in an hour than most people make all day, and somehow they find time to educate us techs about various diseases and problems our patients at the time have.
Shitloads of stressful organisation and sundry paperwork and accounting crap and… basically tons of responsibilities I am glad aren’t mine to deal with.
I am happy to sit in my little corner and do my little contributions, with nothing much to concern me above that.
